In the original text it is merely a kiss, or as mere as a kiss can be between a beautiful young woman and her husband’s handsome doctor. In any case, knowing as we do from the long-simmering buildup how much the doctor loves her — and likely she him — we accept and even require their moment of consummation, sensing it will be the only deep happiness either ever feels.
That kiss, between Astrov and Yelena, as their names are traditionally given, is the sadder of the two sad climaxes of “Uncle Vanya,” Chekhov’s tragicomic comic tragedy about work and waste. (The funnier sad climax occurs when the title character tries to shoot the husband and misses, twice, at close range.) Whatever else happens in a production of the play, the would-be lovers’ intimacy needs to mark an extreme turn in the characters’ lives and in the narrative’s emotional temperature as it comes in for its final landing.
So you’d think the moment would totally flop if both he and she were played by one actor.
Yet in “Vanya,” the Chekhov adaptation that opened on Tuesday at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the encounter is about as erotic as any the legitimate stage has offered, even though it involves just a door, two arms and the human Swiss Army knife Andrew Scott.
Granted, it’s more than a smooch. Scott basically humps the door. And when he claws off his shirt, it is from both characters’ backs.
But this is not just a stunt to see whether a single actor can pull off a full-cast classic. As adapted by Simon Stephens, the author of “Heisenberg,” “Sea Wall” and other gripping dramas, “Vanya” is deeply serious and generally faithful in its engagement with Chekhov, offering not just a modernized gloss on the play’s language and settings (the husband is a pompous old filmmaker instead of a pompous old scholar) but also a new way of seeing into the heart of its beauty.
And anyway, what’s so wrong with a stunt when it becomes a tour de force? Who doesn’t gasp with delight at a bicyclist doing cartwheels on a tightrope? Scott is endlessly and polymorphously resourceful, with an armamentarium of voices, faces, postures and ideas that in various combinations add up to a thousand specific effects. And though I already knew this from his “regular” roles in movies like “All of Us Strangers,” and from a solo multicamera pandemic experiment called “Three Kings,” he produces these effects with no strain and no false modesty, and without ever dropping the ball of emotion.
As it happens, a ball of emotion is one of the ways the doctor, here called Michael, is characterized. (It’s an acid green tennis ball he bounces constantly, suggesting impatience.) The other characters are likewise outfitted with visual or aural clues to help keep them distinct while we get to know them. Helena, as the beautiful if bored wife’s name is styled, fingers languorously a slim gold necklace, often while lolling on a swing. Her husband, the filmmaker, wears a foppish silk scarf. Sonia, the filmmaker’s daughter from a previous marriage, who has spent her most marriageable years helping to run the country estate that pays for his life in the city, gets — and perhaps this is too on the nose — a dishrag.
It’s a mark of the production’s restless imagination that these hints soon evolve from reminders into metonyms. (Sam Yates is the clever director.) When Sonia’s uncle Vanya, here called Ivan, blows his nose in the silk scarf, you need no further information about his elemental hatred and envy of the old man. (Ivan, too, loves Helena.) When Michael wipes his sweaty forehead with the dishrag and tosses it down, you know, before he even considers the question, that he will never love Sonia, no matter how fiercely she desires him.
By then, you no longer depend on the scarves and rags anyway, let alone Ivan’s prank sound-effects generator, from which he occasionally produces belches and sad-trombone whomp-whomps as juvenile commentary on everyone else. Scott’s full-body acting and wide-spectrum voice has obviated the need. He gives Ivan a pacing-in-place gesture that is the essence of want and wasted energy, along with the flustered high voice of a man about to burst a blood vessel. But Michael, with his deep engagement in the natural world, speaks only very deeply. Even their forms of drunkenness are distinct.
All this is remarkable, and most likely the reason Scott and the London production won several major awards last year. The technical elements are exemplary, yet not a dollar showier than they need to be. (The spare set is by Rosanna Vize, the cool lights by James Farncombe, the marvelous sound by Dan Balfour.) And though Scott never changes his outfit — gray pants, teal short-sleeve shirt, white sneakers, by Natalie Pryce — you may find, later, that your memory has provided him with a full closet of 19th-century costumes.
But all that skill (and the chance to see it at close range in a 295-seat Off Broadway theater) is only part of what makes this “Vanya” so good. If Scott were merely adept at the switcheroo illusions — playing two halves of a conversation simultaneously, shooting at someone and being shot — the Chekhov would be charming but not, as great theater requires, new. Indeed, a “regular” production of “Uncle Vanya” with eight cloned Scotts doing eight separate things is not something I’d expect to enjoy as much as I did seeing one do all of it together.
What makes the production exemplary, like the play itself, is the emotion. I hate to think why Scott is such a sadness machine, but the tears (and blushes and glows and sneers) lie very shallow under his skin. He only rarely raises his voice. As the feelings are evidently coming directly and carefully from his heart, he narrowcasts them directly and carefully at yours. In that way he makes even the production’s few missteps feel inevitable, as when the heartbroken Ivan sings the 1959 torch song “If You Go Away.” Who knew that Chekhov wrote it?
I’ve by now seen so many updated adaptations of “Uncle Vanya” (and “The Seagull,” “The Cherry Orchard” and “Three Sisters”) that despite those productions’ general inferiority, they’re beginning to crowd out the originals. This “Vanya” is a reset. As strange as it is in conception, in performance it’s the best I’ve seen. Collecting Ivan and Helena and Michael and Sonia and the rest in one body, and filtering their emotions through one sensibility, does something odd: It makes of the characters an uber-character, with the widest possible range of human feeling, experience, intelligence and foolishness. You may feel, as I did, that in meeting that crowded congregation through Scott, you have finally met Chekhov himself.
The post Review: Eight Andrew Scotts in a Heartbreaking Solo ‘Vanya’ appeared first on New York Times.
